De kogel is door de kerk: as we already talked about earlier, Opera is going to switch to the WebKit engine, leaving its own Presto rendering engine behind. We didn't yet know if they would the switch only on mobile or on the desktop as well, and they cleared that up too: both mobile and desktop Opera Browsers will switch to the WebKit rendering engine.

At the paranoid BS about webkit and 'spying' -- as if what one browser (chrome) or certain companies (Google and Apple) do on that front have ANYTHING to do with the open source rendering engine itself. That's extra crap those companies have tacked on top of the engine, NOT THE ENGINE ITSELF! Hence why if you want chrome without spy, you use Chromium, not Chrome. (or for us Haiku nutters, Webpositive)

So far as Opera using it to render, so long as they don't screw with favicon quicklaunches, custom toolbar buttons, user.css, user.js, the content blocker, portrait mode tabs, flip navigation, the mail client, turbo, the actually useful cache browser, notes, the stellar downloads manager and the dozen other small in-built features I use every day -- then we're fine. After all, these are WHY I use it in the first place -- the built in functionality without hunting down several dozen poorly written and rarely maintained extensions that makes other browser UI feel like rinky toys.

In fact it will be GREAT to have a mature UI around webkit, since to be frank chrome/chromium/safari so far as their UI is concerned always feel like a trip back in time to IE 3 for me -- and that's NOT a compliment.